Welcome

Carey Business School!

Today, we are all about building solutions as we collaborate across industries, disciplines, backgrounds and experiences.

We are linking urban with rural as we explore the immediate challenges of a small farm business. Karma Farm has direct impact on our local food communities and the movement toward sustainable living.

We invite you to become fully immersed in some of the exciting work at Karma Farm, utilizing your business acumen to solve immediate challenges and pave the way for future impact. Thank you for growing out with us!

[Visit Desktop Site for Details]

Stage One

1:00-2:00pm

Challenge Launch

Start to dive into your challenge with your team, beginning the initial information gathering as you map out your team action plan for the next three hours. This is a perfect time to throw all ideas out on the table, brainstorming all possible solution sets.

OutGrowth and Karma Farm will be present to answer questions and offer guidance.

Stage Two

2:00-3:15pm

Solution-Building

At this point, your team should be moving on from the information gathering and brainstorming stage to the solution-building stage. Who will be in charge of what? How will you firm up your different sets of deliverables as a team?

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During this stage, it is important that you have a clear plan of action, so that you can get the best results within a limited period of time.

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Stage Three

3:15-4:00pm

Pitching

Design your team's 8-minute pitch, skit or creative presentation on your solutions and recommendations. Decide how your entire team will be involved.

By 4pm, be sure to (1) email your solutions and deliverables to and (2) complete the feedback form at the bottom of the webpage.

Background

Karma Farm has a website and a growing Instagram following, but they would like to increase their visibility to:

    Increase the number of chefs interested in their products, and

    Grow their business within each of their existing clients (i.e.                    increasing the amount and variety of products each client buys).

In order to do this, they would like to rethink and redesign their weekly email (its design, its efficiency and its appeal) in order to boost interest from current customers. They would also like to have a manageable social media (with a focus on Instagram) strategy that will help them to target their market more accurately.

Your Task

Design a focused content marketing strategy for next six months to a year, using the brand/business information provided, the resources given to you by OutGrowth and your own assessment of the account analytics as primary tools. 

Background

Because of the scheduling and operational differences between farming (suppliers) and restaurant industries (consumers), there are inefficiencies that naturally exist.

Farms map out their yields and harvest during the months of seeding, however for restaurants, ordering tends to have to come from head chefs on a weekly basis, at which point, the product is ready for harvest.

Therefore, the precision with which farms can anticipate demand is extremely important, to maximize time, make profit and minimize waste. This is easier said than done, since restaurants are constantly changing their order quantities, and not all restaurants order produce during all seasons. Some only order pumpkins, for example, while others order sporadically throughout the year.

Currently, Karma Farm sends out a product availability sheet weekly to restaurant chefs via email, and restaurants place their orders for the week, which is then followed by Karma Farm's harvest and distribution of product. To request that head chefs anticipate product needs further in advance isn't always possible, especially because many restaurants have a host of administrative challenges, and menus are always changing.

Therefore, Karma Farm's ability to manage and project demand is best done by analyzing trends and patterns from past seasons. For the past two years, Karma Farm has been entering sales into Quickbooks, however they have not yet had the capacity to analyze this data, or map out sales trends to make future production decisions. 

Your Task

Conduct a 2018-19 demand analysis by crop and month, giving Karma Farm data-driven recommendations so that the business can forecast future demand for the 2020 season and beyond.

Thank You

for growing out with us!

Thank you for joining OutGrowth and Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Student Ventures for a day of immersive learning, career competency-building and social impact. We would love to learn how we can improve. Please take a moment to fill out this short survey. --